If you’re working to grow your social media presence, you’ll probably have noticed that most platforms have adopted the hashtag. They’re used to link different groups together and to make it easier to see how many people are discussing a topic in real-time. It allows you to quickly find and converse with your followers, or to get your posts noticed. For small businesses it also allows you to drive brand recognition and impact customer loyalty.

There are some ‘unwritten’ rules to hashtag use though, and we’ve broken them down for you.

Twitter – #Don’t #Over #Do #It. Using three tags at maximum to a single tweet is the way to go when it comes to Twitter. You want your tags to be relevant, not cheap. Posts with that follow this rule tend to get more interaction than those without or ones that go overboard.

Instagram – In direct contrast to Twitter, Instagram encourages you to use hashtags to the max. Using 10 or more for a single image is not unheard of. In fact, posts with 11 or more hashtags had more engagement than those with fewer.

Pinterest – While Pinterest does support hashtags, and there doesn’t seem to be a limit to how many you can use, they seem a bit… pointless? You can’t search by them, and there’s really no use for them as such. They are useful for cross-promotion and branding though.

Facebook – Alright, this one is really a trick question. Although you can include hashtags on Facebook, they don’t really do much for you. Facebook curates your content. The things that you’re interested in, come directly to you. So for this one, we’re saying: Just don’t use them.

Tumblr – Tumblr hashtags are restricted to the ‘tag’ field at the bottom of a post. What this means is that you can’t create one within the body of a post. While there is no limit to the number of tags you can add to a post, there is a caveat. Your post will not make it to the search results if you’re only re-blogging. So, if you’re looking to use Tumblr as a curation tool, don’t worry about tagging. If however, you want to use it to get noticed, make sure to utilize the tags on all posts you create. What’s even better is that like Twitter, when you search a hashtag, it will show all of the users who have recently used that tag so that you can follow them. This means that hashtag use is a fantastic way to build your following as well.

We hope this guide has given you a bit more insight into the hows and whys of hashtags and how to go about using them. If you’re interested in learning more about how to grow your social media, please feel free to comment below, or contact us today.